Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts) (27 page)

She ran her fingers through her tangled hair, feeling her scalp. No pain, no cuts, her fingers didn’t come away bloody. Had she had a stroke?
Am I dead?

These speculations only increased her anxiety and frustration. Since the market kept beckoning her to enter, she thought it might hold some clue to her identity. She pushed her cart up to the door, which hung by a single hinge and swung like a pendulum. Her cart’s wheels clattered as she moved through the doorway, the noise echoing in the strange, tight silence.

First, she looked through the carts loaded with food and supplies, plucked out items she might be able to use, and dropped them in her cart. The fruits looked overly ripe, the veggies were shriveled or turning brown, but she was too hungry to care. She peeled a soft banana and gobbled it down, and added radishes, a couple of apples, several shriveled oranges, and a zucchini squash to her basket. She found a box of large kitchen matches, some bath soap, and a tall unopened bottle of water. She twisted the cap and drank until her thirst was sated, then put everything into her cart.

She moved the abandoned carts out of her way, pushed hers a safe distance from the door, then picked up a hand basket and started down the closest aisle. A pot or pan, cooking utensils, olive oil, shampoo, towels, a razor, a hairbrush, toothbrush and toothpaste: she could use all of it.

Why had so much merchandise fallen from the shelves? Had there been an earthquake? Was that what had happened here? Was this quake or other disaster the reason she’d ended up living on the street, with no memory of who she was?

She quickly combed through piles of strewn merchandise and was delighted to find a razor, a bottle of shampoo, toothbrush, a heavy iron frying pan, a couple of hand towels. Never mind that the hand towels wouldn’t dry much more than her face and that she didn’t have access to a shower or a pot to pee in. She might be able to use a fountain in one of the parks to clean up.

Fresh clothes were the next item on her agenda.

At the end of the aisle, she looked right, then left, and a profound unease gripped her. A memory shifted around inside of her, something frightening, but she couldn’t grasp it. Why should going
left
affect her at all? To the left stood shelves of noodles, pasta, detergents, pet foods, paper towels, and toilet paper. That aisle led to the registers and was farther from the front door. So what? Why should she fear anything there?

She stared at the merchandise a moment longer, grappling for the memory. She seemed to recall a dark liquid spreading across the floor, but nothing else was attached to the memory.

She turned away from what triggered the unease, and was quickly rewarded with an aisle filled with water—Evian, distilled, volcanic, Perrier, some in plastic, most in glass bottles. She took what she could carry, eager now to get out of here and find someplace where she could clean up.

But when she reached the end of the aisle, a man stood beside her cart, examining the contents. Tall. Caucasian. Dark hair. He seemed familiar to her and she didn’t know why. “Hey, you,” she shouted. “Back off from that cart. It’s mine.”

The man jerked back. “Take it easy, I’m not stealing anything.”

The closer she got to him, the less substantial he looked. She realized she could actually see through him—the shattered window behind him, the carts piled high with goods, the stuff scattered across the floor. “You’re not real.” She hurled a bottle of Perrier at him and it soared right through him, struck the edge of the window and exploded.

“Hey,” he said quickly. “Tess, it’s me. Ian.”

“My name’s not Tess and I don’t know anyone named Ian.”

He abruptly faded away. Spooked, she quickly pushed her cart out of the market and down the street.
Tess, Ian, Tess, Ian, Tess, Ian.
The names slammed around inside her, screaming,
Remember me, c’mon you can do it, remember me.

She remembered nothing related to those names or any others.

She went into a deserted clothing store. Merchandise puddled on the floor, hangers had been tossed around, the cash register drawer lolled like a giant tongue, and didn’t hold a single dollar bill. The place looked as if it had been ransacked. She moved through the mess, pawing through the clothes until she found a pair of jeans that looked as if they would fit her, a long-sleeved T-shirt, a lightweight jacket that reached to her thighs, a couple pairs of underwear. Forget bras, who needed a bra? Shoes, she definitely needed shoes, and went through a pile of them until she found a pair of workout shoes that fit her. Keens. They had lots of openings in them, were springy, blissfully comfortable. Multidimensional shoes. Wearing these suckers, she thought, she could become a comic book heroine.

She pushed her cart across the cobblestoned street and up two blocks to the park. The place was deserted—no couples sitting on the benches, no one feeding the birds, empty, zilch. In fact, the only birds she saw were dead ones, and they lay everywhere. Sparrows, hummingbirds, blackbirds, blue jays, hawks, wrens, ducks, even wading birds. But not a single condor.

What horror had killed them?

She pushed her cart around the dead birds until it was next to the fountain, dug out her soap, shampoo, razor, and set everything on the wall. She glanced around once more, making sure she was alone here, then stripped off her filthy clothes and eased into the water. It chilled her, held her, caressed her, and felt so utterly magnificent against her skin that for long, delicious moments, she floated in the fountain, her mind a perfect blank. She sank beneath the surface and the face of the man who had appeared in the market drifted into her thoughts. Was her name really Tess and, if so, how had this guy known that? If he was Ian, what was he to her? Why had he looked like a ghost?

She soaped up her body, washed and rinsed her hair, shaved her legs and underarms, then got out of the fountain and dried herself with a couple of the hand towels. Laughable. She put on clean clothes and her superhero shoes. She deposited her old clothes in a nearby garbage can, then looked around through the bushes and trees for a place to sleep. Why was it still twilight?

She didn’t want to think too closely about that, about the twilight. An inner resistance. Okay, she would honor that feeling for now and not think about it.
Stay fixed in the moment, don’t ask questions, don’t think:
that seemed to be the best way to fight her anxiety. Keep her head a merciful blank.

She pushed her cart into the monkey puzzle trees and pines, glanced back at the dead birds.
What happened here?
Why hadn’t they been cleaned up? Buried? Had whatever killed all these birds also stolen her memory?

“Stop asking,” she told herself, then dug through her cart until she found a box of garbage bags. She pulled out several and started collecting the corpses.

When both bags were full, she carried them into the thicket and searched for some place to bury them. Since she didn’t have a shovel or anything to dig with, she found a large pile of dead leaves, dug through them with her foot, and emptied the first bag. She spread the corpses out, so the leaves wouldn’t be piled too high, started covering them, then stopped to study them.

From what she could see in this truncated light, the birds didn’t have any obvious injuries.
Had they all died at once? From what? No questions, no questions
. But she couldn’t help herself. Nothing made sense.

She picked up a crow, lifted each wing, ran her fingers down its back, but couldn’t find an injury. She examined the crow’s beak, its feet, didn’t see anything unusual. But how would she, who couldn’t even recall her own name, know what was usual or unusual for a dead crow?

She set the bird down in the leaves, quickly covered it and the others, and moved deeper into the trees. She found a burial spot for the second bag of corpses. By the time she finished covering them, she was too exhausted to gather up more birds and decided to resume after she’d gotten some sleep.

Her eyes felt so dry that she wondered how long it had been since she’d slept. And
where
had she slept last? She couldn’t remember.

“Can’t remember” had become her mantra.

She plucked her sleeping bag from the cart, spread it out against the ground. She climbed into it with her wet hair, her clean body covered in clean clothes, her feet encased in the superhero shoes, and lay there, eyes wide open, staring into the twilight that spilled through the branches of the trees.

I am … I love … I am loved by … Nothing, nothing, nothing. Fuck.
She covered her eyes with her arm and struggled against a rising despair. Without memories, she was nothing, a vacuum, an empty vessel.

She might have dozed off, she wasn’t sure, but when her arm fell away from her eyes, a pale violet orb hovered just above her. She reached up and touched it, and immediately sensed its energy was female. It felt familiar to her.

She pushed up on her elbows and the orb floated toward her, then hovered right in front of her. It looked like a transparent glass bubble, alien but strangely beautiful. The violet grew darker at the edges and paled toward the center, where it pulsed with light. She wondered if it was the soul of someone who had passed on. She remembered reading somewhere that orbs might be the souls of the departed. Why could she remember
that
bit of information, but nothing about herself? Had someone she loved died recently?

The orb brushed her forehead, a soft, cool touch, like a mother’s kiss, then it splintered and broke apart and the bits of violet light drifted into the air, blinking off and on like fireflies. Was her mother dead? What did her mother look like? How could she not remember her own mother?

She watched the lights until they reached the edge of the park and winked out for good. For moments afterward she felt such an acute and terrible loneliness that she nearly leaped to her feet and ran after the bits of light. But just then, two men turned into the park, pushing grocery carts loaded with stuff. Their carts crunched over the dead birds, as though the men didn’t see them. But they saw her.

One of them said something to the other, laughed, and the taller of the two men strode toward her. Tess slipped out of the sleeping bag and stood, the cart between her and this man. Even beneath his baggy coat, she could tell he was muscular and probably outweighed her by at least a hundred pounds. Although she was tall, six feet without shoes, he was slightly taller. In the twilight, he looked Latino but not Ecuadorian, and young, mid-twenties, she guessed.

“Chica,”
he said.

Without even thinking about it, she replied,
“Chico. ¿Qué hubo?”

It shocked her that she not only spoke Spanish, but sounded like a native. It apparently surprised him, too. Because of her blond hair, he had probably pegged her as an American or a European who was unlikely to speak the language.
“Ah, que bueno que hablas español.”

“I also speak English. What’s your point?”

In equally perfect English, he said, “My point, bitch, is that my friend and I need what you’ve got in this cart.”

He grabbed the front of it, she held on tightly, and he pulled even harder. She snatched the frying pan off the top of her stuff, shoved the cart at him, and he stumbled back, tripped, and went down. She whacked the pan against the soles of his sneakers and pushed the cart away from him. “It’s mine, asshole, and if you come near me again, I’ll bash your face in. Are we clear on that,
amigo
?”

He scooted back on his ass, but the man’s companion raced toward them now, his long hair flying out behind him, his shouts echoing in the air. “Serbio, take her from the right.”

Serbio, emboldened by his friend’s intervention, scrambled up, darted to her right, and his companion shot at her from the left.

Rage burst from her—rage that her memory was gone, she was homeless, that these two men threatened her. She spun, clutching the frying pan with both hands, and swung it like a baseball bat. It struck Serbio first, and he lurched back, shrieking, hands flying to his bloody nose. The other guy reacted quickly, deflecting a blow to his face that glanced off his shoulder. He tackled her and they both crashed to the ground.

She lost her grip on the pan, punched the man in the ribs, beat her fists against his back, fought to kick him off. But he grabbed handfuls of her hair and slammed her head against the ground. Fractals erupted across her vision, millions of pieces of splintered light that swirled into strange, frightening patterns. She tangled her fingers in his long hair and jerked with such force that his head snapped back. She somehow managed to twist her head to the right and chomped down on his wrist. It felt like her teeth struck bone.

He squealed like a wounded pig, she tasted his blood in her mouth, and as he reared up, gripping his bloody fist, she rolled away from him, swept up the frying pan, and slammed it over his head. He slumped to the ground and her eyes darted to Serbio, who abruptly stopped.

“You’re one crazy bitch,” he yelled.

She scooped up her sleeping bag, tossed it in her cart. “Leave me the fuck alone.” She moved away from him, her spine against the cart, pushing it, and swung the frying pan so that with every backward swing it clanged against the cart, metal against metal. The sound echoed menacingly in the strange twilight, and she kept at it until Serbio picked up his unconscious companion and quickly carried him over to their carts.

She moved around to the back of the cart, gripped the handle and pushed it rapidly into the trees. The wheels clattered over stones and roots, drooping branches snagged on her clothes. She glanced back several times, making sure that Serbio wasn’t following her, and finally reached a packed-earth sidewalk that ran parallel to the park. She picked up a handful of smooth stones, large enough to do some serious damage.

She tore up the sidewalk, desperately seeking an empty building, some spot like that clothing store she’d gone into, where the windows and doors weren’t damaged or ruined, where she might take refuge until she’d figured things out.